This is a residential building in east London designed by the young British architect, David Adjaye. It's made of painted black brick and looks tough and urban. However, on the very top of the building, there sits a very elegant rooftop gallery made of glass. The contrast between glass and black brick is seductive, it suggests that we could all balance the masculine and feminine sides of ourselves. The building shows how you can build in very run-down inner city areas and make something good not by denying where you are, but precisely by acknowledging and celebrating it. The building could be called brutally beautiful. We've got one word, beauty, in our vocabulary to talk about architecture, but really, this covers a whole range of different kinds of attraction. Maybe there should be a subcategory of beauty called ‘industrial beauty' to capture what's special about this building.
Queen's Building, Emmanuel College, Cambridge
This is a very fine building designed by the British architect Michael Hopkins and was completed in the mid 1990s. It's an elegant curved stone structure, which sits in its location with ease and grace - it both manages to catch the eye and blends into the historic surroundings of Cambridge. There are often a lot of tussles between supporters of modern architecture and classical enthusiasts - think of the endless debate between those who are pro and against Prince Charles's traditional views - but this building is one that seems to satisfy both camps. It looks classical without falling into any cliched visions of the past, while still retaining a lot of features found in old-fashioned buildings, like symmetry and regularity. A big question in architecture is: can we build today in a way that both satisfies the emotional needs to which old styles cater and yet acknowledges contemporary realities? Can we build in a way that reminds us of the comfort of tradition and yet doesn't turn its back entirely on the world we actually inhabit? Can we learn to translate the best of the past successfully into the language of the present? The lesson of this building is ‘yes'.
Maggie's Centre, Dundee
Maggie's centers are a series of day-care centers sited in the grounds of hospitals in the UK, built for people diagnosed with cancer. The idea behind them is that where you are can so seriously effect how you feel that you might be able better to fight cancer if you have the opportunity to spend time in a beautiful building. The Dundee Maggie's Center was designed by the Californian architect, Frank Gehry, who also designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The building has a comfortingly domestic feeling, it's a house rather than an institution, and invites its users to curl up with a book on one of its many window ledges, and take in a sublime view over the water. It's always ambitious to claim that architecture can change your life. This building is ample proof that it can.
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